Deciding everything

Sorry for not posting this sooner, but I think this blog has run its course… at least for now. It’s not that there aren’t things to be thankful for. There are, and they’re everywhere. I’m just lacking the motivation to keep this project going at the moment. But just because the blog is put on hiatus, it doesn’t mean my efforts to cultivate gratitude will follow suit. It’s an important priority in my life and I’m not giving up on it. But with the election (and ND at #5 in the polls), my online attention has been elsewhere. I feel the need to write more critically and on other topics. For those of you who have followed this little journey, there’s really nothing to say but thank you. :) (And I’ll let you know if and when the blog is revived). xoxo!

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

Coffee, friends, and October afternoons warm enough to sit outside

Plant
So that your own heart
Will grow.

Love
So God will think,

“Ahhhhh,
I got kin in that body!
I should start inviting that soul over
For coffee and 
Rolls.”

Sing
Because this is a food
Our starving world
Needs.

Laugh
Because that is the purest
Sound.

I Got Kin

Hafiz

Now I become myself. It’s taken
Time, many years and places;
I have been dissolved and shaken,
Worn other people’s faces,
Run madly, as if Time were there,
Terribly old, crying a warning,
“Hurry, you will be dead before— “
(What? Before you reach the morning?
Or the end of the poem is clear?
Or love safe in the walled city?)
Now to stand still, to be here,
Feel my own weight and density!

Now I Become Myself

May Sarton

I am a frayed and nibbled survivor in a fallen world, and I am getting along. I am aging and eaten and have done my share of eating too. I am not washed and beautiful, in control of a shining world in which everything fits, but instead am wandering awed about on a splintered wreck I’ve come to care for, whose gnawed trees breathe delicate air, whose bloodied and scarred creatures are my dearest companions, and whose beauty beats and shines not in its imperfections, but overwhelmingly in spite of them. - Annie Dillard

Thoroughly obsessed with this kid

Indian summers, flasks, fair food, beer gardens showing the ND game, understanding friends, and concerts where you can sing along to every word

Autumn begins in the night. Now the days, often as not, are still summery, if more bearably so. The midday sun is not perceptibly lower in the sky.

But the sun has, somehow, gotten faster. And with night settling in at dinner time and burrowing deeper, it is in the hours of darkness that summer literally runs out of time.

In the cocoon of the home, in the unaccustomed silence lately filled by the air-conditioner, the air flowing in feels, smells, tastes different — not just because it is cooler, but also because it is different air, hailing from a different part of the planet. Sultry summer nights are made of stiflingly hot air from Southwestern deserts simmered with emanations from the Gulf of Mexico into a thick gumbo. But now the jet stream, the ever-flowing border zone between hot and cold air masses, is making its tentative, give-and-take pilgrimage southward, and on cool nights, the air is fresh from the pine forests of Canada.

I was a little grouchy about my parking space today, and then I remembered reading this. There are people whose lives are hard. I am not one of them. 

waking up to her

Empty streets & a new car

A sublime September Sunday afternoon spent in good company, eating delicious food, with a perfect baby nuzzled on my chest

A September Saturday night that still feels like it could be July